"Leftist Dynamite"

Is Joseph McCarthy really "the stereotype of the Big Bad Wolf of fascism" as so many liberal intellectuals assume? Quite the contrary, said Pulitzer Poet Peter Viereck, associate professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, before the American Historical Association last week:

"Liberals are quite correctly aware of the more obvious right-wing root of McCarthyism in Old Guard Republicanism.

But they are often unaware of its less obvious left-wing root in the midwestern radicalism of the old Populist and Progressive Parties . . . The normal, middle-road, educated American that you meet in literary-academic circles assumes automatically that McCarthy is a fascist, out to found the usual storm-troop dictatorship as described in the sociology texts based on European history ... I view McCarthyism as so dangerously seductive to America, and such a very real threat to our liberties, because it is so different from fascism and from analogies with Europe . . .

"McCarthy basically is not the fascist type but the type of the left-wing Populist or Jacobin agitator, the barn burner, the Wild Man, by an infallible instinct and not 'by accident' subverting precisely those institutions that are the most conservative, venerable and patrician--from the Constitution, the most decorated or paternal generals (Marshall, Eisenhower, Taylor, Zwicker) to the leaders of our most deeply established religions and precisely the most ancient of our universities . . .

"He satisfies the resentments of his followers (both those from the Eastern slums and those from the Western, nouveaux riches) because his sincerest hatred is always against the oldest, most rooted, and most deeply educated patrician families (the Cabot Lodges, Achesons, Conants, Adlai Stevensons). Confining myself to native American growths and not to alien importations like Communism, I would classify McCarthy as the most radically and instinctively leftist dynamite in American history since the I.W.W...."

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